Public Policy and Massive Data Faculty Seminar Series

The McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University is pleased to present the Public Policy and Massive Data Faculty Seminar Series. The goal of the series is to establish a cross-disciplinary research institute to further the innovative uses of data for policy and social science.

AY 2017-2018

WORKSHOP SERIES - Using Python for Data Collection, Manipulation, and Analysis

Announcing a workshop series focused on using Python for collecting, manipulating and analyzing data. The workshop series assumes no prior knowledge of Python programming and is appropriate for beginners. These are interactive workshops - bring your laptop. Familiarity with STATA and R is a plus. If you have thought about switching from STATA or R to Python - now is your chance! The workshops are open to all Georgetown faculty, students, and staff.

The focus of this workshop is learning how to collect data from the web, creating variables from that data, and using that data within a statistical and machine learning analysis. In this session, you will learn how to:

Install the following packages using pip install before the workshop: requests, Beautiful Soup 4 (beautifulsoup4), pandas, numpy, sklearn, statsmodels. We will learn about all these packages.

Network Analysis in PythonDate: March 1st, 3:15-5Location: Healy

Learn some basic network theory. Learn how network theory and analysis can add nuance to your research question and be incorporated into your causal analysis. In this workshop, you will learn about:

The basics of network theory, including learning about different network measures and their theoretical implications.

Network clustering approaches

Different types of network data, and how to craft relational ties from your data

Methods for generating network measures for use in your analysis

Install the following packages using pip install before the workshop: pandas, numpy, networkx, statsmodels. We will work with all these packages during the workshop.

Sponsored By: The Mass Data Institute (MDI), McCourt School of Public Policy

Previous Events

(AY 2015-2016)

Presentations will be in Old North 205 unless otherwise noted. Titles and papers will be distributed when possible.

Monday, February 8, 3.45 p.m.: Sandy Calvert is the Director of the Children’s Media Center in Georgetown’s Psychology Department. Her talk is “21st Century Environments: The Promises and Perils of U.S. Children's Media.”

Monday, February 29, 3.30 p.m.: Edmund Malesky is a specialist in the political development in Vietnam and China and an associate professor at Duke university. Title/paper will be distributed soon.

Monday, March 14, 3.30 p.m.: Winter Mason is a computational social scientist at Facebook. His talk is “Understanding Politics and Political Issues with Social Media Data.”

Monday, April 11, 3.30 p.m.: (tentative) Dayanand Manoli of the University of Texas, currently visiting at Treasury.

(AY 2014-2015)

Tuesday, Nov 18, 10:30am-11:45am: Charan Singh, Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor of Economics and Social Science, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Presentation Title: “Challenges Facing The Indian Economy." Old North Room 205.

Monday, Dec. 1, 12:30pm-1:45pm: Chloe Gibbs, Assistant Professor, Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia. Old North Room 205.

Friday, February 20, 12:00pm-1:15pm: Noah Smith, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. Old North Room 205.

Thursday, March 5, 3:00pm-4:20pm: Rachel Augustine Potter, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, University of Virginia. Old North Room 205.

Thursday, March 19, 3:00pm-4:15pm: Elizabeth Stuart, Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Old North Room 205.